Ephemeral Islands

The date is April 15, 1986. Eighteen American F-111 jets are hurtling towards Libya from bases in England. Operation code name: El Dorado Canyon. Its purpose: to exact revenge on the regime of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi — 10 days earlier, a bomb ripped through a Berlin discotheque popular with American servicemen, killing a civilian and a soldier and wounding hundreds more [1].

An intercepted cable from Tripoli congratulating the Libyan embassy in East Berlin on a job well done is all the casus belli President Reagan needs. But minutes before the airstrike drops 60 tons of bombs on Tripoli and Benghazi [2], the task force encounters a mysterious smokestack emerging from a dark shadow just below the waves of the Mediterranean. Suspecting a Libyan submarine [3], the jets attack it with depth charges.

Unwittingly, the Air Force has just bombarded a geopolitical flashpoint from the previous century. The smoke didn’t emanate from a Libyan sub, but from Empedocles [4], a submarine volcano peaking about 20 feet below the surface of the Mediterranean.

The volcano’s tip is an ephemeral island, flirting with sea level. The first documented emergence of the island dates from the First Punic War in the mid-Third Century B.C. It is also reported to have surfaced in 10 B.C.; in both cases, it re-submerged soon after.

But its most controversial manifestation followed the 1831 eruption, when the sea boiled and bubbled and a column of smoke was visible from Sciacca on the Sicilian coast, where the pervasive stink of brimstone turned the silverware black. When a basalt-like chunk of land rose above the waves and stayed there, no less than four European countries rushed to claim the island, strategically located in the Strait of Sicily between that island and the coast of Tunisia [5].

What followed reads like the motif of one of the opéras comiques that were so popular at the time. On Aug. 2, 1831, with the world’s newest island still hot from the oven, Capt. Humphrey Fleming Senhouse of the British warship the St Vincent planted the Union Jack on what was henceforth to be called Graham Island, one day’s sail west of the British colony of Malta.

On Aug. 17, an emissary of King Ferdinand II of Both Sicilies [6] cut down the British colors and replaced them with those of his sovereign, renaming the island Ferdinandea in his honor. On Sept. 29, a French scientific mission planted France’s tricolore on the island, which they named Julia. The Spanish then claimed the island as Corrao [7], but it is unclear whether they did any actual flag-planting.

GEBCO; Joe Burgess/The New York Times

Would-be claimants weren’t the only visitors: for five brief months, the island was the world’s coolest tourist hangout. A select procession of adventurous visitors — Sir Walter Scott among them [8] — came to inspect Ferdinandea’s black beaches and its two salt lakes, and to dance on the edge of the volcano’s sulphur-leaking crater, 200 feet above sea level. There was even talk of building a hotel.

But the material spewed out by the volcano turned out to be particularly susceptible to erosion. At its greatest extent, Ferdinandea had a circumference of over 15,000 feet and an area of about 1 square mile, but as the eruption subsided, it quickly crumbled back into the sea. On Dec. 17, two Sicilian observers filed a missing island report: Ferdinandea was gone — and with it, the diplomatic headache of adjudicating a four-way claim over a newly emerged island.

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Ferdinandea, located 19 miles south of Sicily, thus well beyond the accepted Sicilian territorial waters of the time [9], was a borderline case in two respects. Its most crucial border is the surface of the sea. The accident of elevation marks the difference between its existence as an unclaimable seamount — no more than a shipping hazard — and as a potentially hotly contested piece of actual, dry-land real estate.

Another eruption briefly resurrected the island, and its powder keg potential, in 1863. In 2002, as seismic rumblings suggested yet another reincarnation of the island, the Italians pre-emptively lowered a marble plaque onto the summit of Empedocles, emblazoned with the slogan: “This piece of land, once Ferdinandea, was and shall always belong to the Sicilian people” [10].

It hasn’t resurfaced — yet. If it did, the off-again, on-again island would possibly resurrect the four-way claim to its territory, and its territorial waters, a doorstop with a 12-mile radius. That circular borderline being Ferdinandea’s other liminal aspect.

The other claimants involved in the 1831 dispute have remained remarkably equivocal on the subject of sovereignty over the rock. Neither France, Spain nor Britain has confirmed or denied that its almost 200-year-old claim would be valid in case the island resurfaces (presumably Malta, now sovereign would inherit Britain’s claim). Two more voices could join the choir: the now sovereign nations of Libya and Tunisia, who could use proximity — and maybe a bit of swift flag-planting — as an excellent argument for ownership.

Halfway across the world, another ephemeral island is testing the definition of territory, and the limits of sovereignty – this time with a little human help. Okinotorishima [11] is a reef about three miles long and one mile wide that only barely breaks the surface: at high tide, it sticks out no more than 5 inches above sea level. But that was enough for Japan to claim the atoll [12] as its southernmost possession.

GEBCO; Joe Burgess/The New York Times

But maybe not forever. Both erosion and rising sea levels are conspiring to wipe this most tenuous of territories off the map. And that would do more than hurt Japan’s national pride. It would also remove the southern linchpin from the Exclusive Economic Zone that surrounds Japan. As agreed at the Third United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea in 1982, territorial waters extend 12 nautical miles from the coast, but states can exercise certain rights over the natural resources in a 200-mile zone beyond their shores [13] – whether those shores are on the mainland, the largest island or the smallest, most remote spit of land in the country’s holdings.

Losing Okinotorishima would mean losing a zone of about 150,000 square miles. That’s a lot of sushi, not to mention all the oil and gas fields that might be lurking beneath the seabed. And yet that seemed to be what was happening: only three of Okinotorishima’s five rocks that periodically emerged above water in the 1930s still do so today.

Japan wasn’t going to take the island’s fate as a given. In 1987, Japan started construction on three platforms on the atoll’s laguna, naming them Kitakoshima (“Little North Island”), Higashikoshima (“Little East Island”) and Minamikoshima (“Little South Island”); nearby is a weather station-plus-helipad on stilts – all a means of reinforcing the island’s viability. And that’s not all: since 2006, the Japanese Fishery Ministry planted 40,000 new corals, in the hope of combating future erosion. In all, the Japanese government has spent close to $1 billion to keep Okinotorishima above the waves.

China, which covets several of the disputed shoals in the nearby South China Sea [14], disputes Japan’s sovereignty over Okinotorishima — claiming in 1994 that it is not an atoll at all, but merely a collection of submarine rocks. This invited a rash of Japanese nationalist expeditions to Okinotorishima, and in-your-face plans to build a lighthouse and a power station (the latter coming in handy to power the former).

Powerless to raise the reef, or rule the waves, the Japanese resorted to the trick performed a few years earlier by the Sicilians: they lowered a plaque onto the semi-island, inscribed with the fervent wish that it be and remain: 1 Okinotori Island, Ogasawara Village, Tokyo.

Okinotorishima and Ferdinandea, both bedecked with names aplenty and wishful plaques, remain mirror images of each other: with one constantly on the verge of existing and the other continuously on the edge of extinction, they are in a class of two: ephemeral islands whose borderline existence has major consequences for the equally arbitrary zones of sovereignty drawn up around them.

Frank Jacobs is a London-based author and blogger. He writes about cartography, but only the interesting bits.

[1] A second American soldier would die of his injuries two months later. The La Belle disco was located on the Hauptstraße of Berlin’s Friedenau district, in the Roxy-Palast building, designed in 1929 by Martin Punitzer and considered an exemplar of the architectural style known as Neue Sachlichkeit (“New Sobriety”).

[2] Destroying around 20 aircraft and killing Qaddafi’s adopted daughter. One American jet was lost, allowing the Libyans to claim “victory.” The jets took off from American airbases in England, but traveled around Spain and through the Strait of Gibraltar — a circuitous route, as France, Spain and Italy all denied the Air Force the use of their air space for the operation.

[3] The Soviet Union had given Qaddafi six Foxtrot-class subs in 1982, so a Libyan submarine threat was not unthinkable. But no Libyan sub patrols had been reported since 1984, and none may have been operational at the time of America’s airstrike. Facts on the final fate of Libya’s submarine fleet are flimsy. One sub has been reported sunk, another stranded by sanctions in Lithuania and a third captured at Benghazi by the victorious rebels in Libya’s recent revolution.

[4] Named after the Greco-Sicilian philosopher who posited the theory of the four elements (air, fire, water and earth) as the basis of everything, it is one of the 12 underwater volcanoes of the so-called Phlegraean Fields of the Sea of Sicily. Others are Galatea, Madrepore and Terribile. Not to be confused with the Phlegraean Fields near Naples, a partly submerged area of volcanic activity famed as the home of the fire god Vulcan and the entrance to the Underworld. The name of both areas derives from the Greek flegos, which means “burning.”

[5] The strait between Sicily and Cap Bon, Tunisia’s northwestern-most point, is 90 miles wide. The island that emerged in 1831 was located about 20 miles off Sicily. The only other island in the strait, more toward Tunisia, is Pantelleria, also of volcanic origin. It is Italian, in spite of its Arabic-derived name (Bint al-Riyah translates as “Daughter of the Wind”).

[6] Did one Sicily also sink into the sea again? No: when the Kingdom of Naples lost the island, it maintained its claim to be the Kingdom of Sicily. Thus, when the island was reunited with the Neapolitan throne, it became the Kingdom of Both Sicilies.

[7] Other names for the island are Sciacca, Nerita, Proserpine and Hotham. The varied nomenclature reflects the island’s uncertain status and protean, uncertain and disputed status.

[8] Another literary connection: James Fenimore Cooper based his 1847 novel “The Crater, or Vulcan’s Peak” on Ferdinandea’s emergence. Jules Verne’s “Captain Antifer” of 1894 also features an emerging, and then subsiding, island.

[9] A few nautical miles for most countries. The now generally accepted limit of 12 nautical miles came into effect only during the 20th century.

[11] The frequently used Japanese suffix “shima” (sometimes rendered as “jima”) means “island.” As with Ferdinandea, there is no shortage of names for this almost nonentity. An alternate name for the reef is Parece Vela, which is Spanish for “Looks like a sail.” While that Spanish name is also used in English, another name is Douglas Reef.

[12] Okinotori was annexed by Japan only in 1931. It was taken over by the United States after World War II and handed back to Japan in 1968.

[13] When exclusive economic zones of different countries overlap, it’s up to them to decide where the border between them lies — usually a neat median line through the overlapping area.

[14] A tangle of disputes in the South China Sea among China, Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia involves overlapping claims of each of those countries (as well as Taiwan and Brunei) to the Spratly and Paracel Islands. Many are de facto occupied by claimants. Some are tiny, but none are as liminal as Ferdinandea or Okinotori. China’s extensive claims, all the way down to James Shoal just off the Borneo coast, are an attempt to roll out its sovereignty over almost the entire sea — and its resources.

Correction: May 30, 2012An earlier version of this article gave the wrong size for the island of Ferdinandea. It was about 1 square mile, not 2.5 square miles.

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Countries are defined by the lines that divide them. But how are those lines decided — and why are some of them so strange? In Borderlines, Frank Jacobs, author of “Strange Maps: An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities,” explores the stories behind the global map, one line at a time.